Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress today and reportedly hedge his bets by meeting with President Biden and former President Trump. He is also reported to be trying to schedule a meeting with Vice President Harris when her campaign schedule allows.
The Vice President will not attend the address today. House Speaker Mike Johnson threatened to arrest Democratic lawmakers if they protest the speech but now Republican Representative Thomas Massie says that he won’t come either because he calls the speech “political theater on behalf of the State Department” and he won’t be used as a prop.
This speech is fraught, to say the least. On Tuesday night, protestors reportedly disrupted a state dinner to protest Netanyahu and Mossad by scattering “mealworms and maggots on the dining tables and unleashed crickets across several floors. The fire alarms were activated for more than half an hour, resulting in significant disorder and disrupting preparations ahead of Netanyahu’s scheduled address to Congress.”
Netanyahu is facing Israeli protestors too. The families of hostages in Gaza say that he is sabotaging peace deals that would bring their loved ones home. They traveled to Washington to have their message heard. According to Responsible Statescraft:
“It is time now to end this war, to end our suffering, and along the way, to end the suffering of millions in Gaza,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of one of the hostages, who lives in Israel but refused to travel with Netanyahu . “I implore Democrats and Republicans to do all that you can to let our Prime Minister know that the U.S. knows that the time is now.”
